Biff Bam Pop! presents The GAR! Podcast, the Glenn Walker and Ray Cornwall weekly podcast where they talk unrehearsed about whatever happens to come to mind. It’s an audio-zine for your mind, a nerd exploration of a nerd world. This week, we’re talking about love, and Charles Manson, and… oh, I can’t do it. I confess. We messed up. This is our worst episode ever. We own it. We know it. We apologize ahead of time. Still, we hope you’ll listen anyway. See and hear more after the jump.

This afternoon, Marvel Studios held a press conference at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles to announce the next batch of movies in their ever-growing Marvel Cinematic Universe. There were some surprises, some we already knew, but all of it is exciting. Meet me after the jump for all the news.

Earlier this year, when the first trailer to Thor: The Dark World was released, I found myself surprisingly excited. Here was what looked to be a bit of a throw back film; a bit of a Marvel Studios homage to the those great swashbuckling sword and sorcery movies of the early 1980’s: Conan, The Sword and the Sorcerer, The Beastmaster and Krull. Those were movies that I loved as a kid – and love even more now.

With Thor: The Dark World, it seemed liked the eightification of comic book films was upon us. And in this particular case, I was ok with that. There was no better decade for this kind of genre than the decade that spawned all of those cool movies of my youth, happily spent at the video rental store.

Thor: The Dark World, was more than that, though. It was a movie that combined muscular heroes and dreaded villains with big-budget sets and fantastic special effects with well-known actors, working inside a shared fictional universe, playing well with at least three other important film franchises. A truly twenty-first century aesthetic.

It’s Saturday. Let me tell you more about the movie, Thor: The Dark World after the jump.

I think Joss Whedon owns a shawarma franchise. But I get ahead of myself.

There were a bunch of ways to watch The Avengers opening day. Okay, a bunch of legal ways. You could go see it during the normal evening hours on the Friday it opens. You can go to the Friday midnight screening. Or you could attend a marathon screening of all the films in the Avengers series, followed by a midnight premier.

The experience was definitely a unique one. I met with a group of friends at a local Denny’s for breakfast (it was convenient to the theatre as much as anything else).

And so it begins – the summer blockbuster season, which kicks off with what just may be the film to beat. Let’s not waste time – we all know The Avengers is going to do big business this weekend, but how much will it actually gross over the next three days. Here are our predictions: